SINGAPORE- She collected her O-level results on Monday (Jan 14) – but 16-year-old Benecia Tang already has the years ahead all planned out.

Prior to receiving her results, the Crescent Girls’ School student had secured a place in Singapore Polytechnic’s (SP) School of Business through the Early Admissions Exercise (EAE).

The EAE is an aptitude-based admissions exercise that allows students to apply for and receive conditional offers for admission to polytechnics prior to receiving their final grades.

When she was in Secondary 3, Benecia started a project on community marketplace app Carousell selling customisable keychains and badges, using skills she learnt in her co-curricular activity, the Innovation and Enterprise Club in her school.

“I had trouble reaching out to my target audience, so in the break before I start school again (in April), I will try to look for a job or internship in the field of marketing,” she said.

She added that her aim is to start a business before she graduates from SP.

But all of that is merely in preparation for a bigger goal – she wants to eventually set up a social enterprise for children with learning difficulties.

Benecia has dyslexia.

She was in Henry Park Primary School when she first found out that she had trouble with reading as well as spelling.

In Primary 4, she was officially diagnosed with the disorder.

Her two younger sisters, who are now 12 and 10, were also diagnosed with the same condition around the same period.

Through her planned social enterprise, she wants to teach children how to live and learn with dyslexia.

She also wants to try and help children identify their condition earlier.

“(My learning challenges) were prevalent even before P4,” said Benecia, whose mother is a teacher.

“My mum said I started learning to read later than others my age. She had asked my pre-school teacher about it but the teacher said she was being ‘kiasu’.

“I knew that I was not on the same level as everyone else, and I felt capped because of my dyslexia.”

She had issues with reading long passages, as she would skip lines subconsciously. But her therapist taught her how to overcome this by using a reading template that forced her to go line by line.

Currently, at the Dyslexia Association of Singapore, students with the condition can take classes on similar strategies to help them learn better.

“When I’m able to, I would like to level the playing ground for people like me and my sisters,” Benecia said.

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